Just added a Design 4 with an accordion menu just like the actual RichFaces showcase (be sure to clean your browser cache to see it. I used HTML meta tag to have no cache enabled but looks like it wasn't enough...).

But I don't really like this menu : even if it has a better design, it's too much time and clics to browse through all of it.

Right now, my preference go to Design 3 (with the VDL bis) : even if it's give me an odd impression at first sight (because of the demo with only 50% width of the screen and not having any real left margin), it's the most optimized one, giving maximum width to both the demo and VDL and having them on the same screen. The menu is always displayed (because the top navbar is fixed) and you can browse it easily just by moving your mouve over it.

Are there any options we can rule out? We should take the remaining ones, and open it up to a poll in this developer space.

More on what i don't like

Option 3 is cool but it's hard to discover where to click for new comopnents. We could overcome this with a real cool landing page, with a grid of sceenshots for each comopnent that you clilck on to get to the sample for that component.

Option 2 I don't like having the vdl click on a seperate tab, although this is more friendly for older/smaller monitors. Perhaps an approach to explore for the mobile view of the showcase?

Option 4 is also my favorite - perhaps we could combine 1 and 4, where you get the popup of 1 until the menu is expanded?

If there is no clear consensus on which one stands out (they are all great ideas Paul!) we can take the front runners and create a poll in this dev space. A poll chossing between options 2, and a hybrid of 1/4 would be useful IMO.